business intelligence

Business Intelligence: Data Warehousing, Reporting and Analytics

Authored by Vicki Lund-Tulloch, Business Intelligence Administrator, IT Services

Have you ever wanted to know…

  • Are we reporting the right information, in the best way, to government bodies to boost our comparative rankings, meet compliance requirements and secure desired funding levels?
  • Can our academic and business decision-makers easily analyze operational data, from across faculties and functional areas, to make better decisions in a budget sensitive climate?
  • Do our marketing strategies align with student feedback and leverage the demographic, psychographic and geographic trends within our student body?
  • How many annual enrolments do we require – of a full fee paying, government supported and scholarship nature – to remain profitable and secure desired levels of government funding?
  • Do we have access to the right student, research, performance and departmental data to compile effective research grants?
  • Are we building the right infrastructure to support student satisfaction, learning, retention and successful graduation?
  • Are our industry partnerships aligned with current student courses to ensure relevancy and boost successful job placement upon graduation?

Addressing these questions requires the timely and accurate student, research and operational data that Business Intelligence can provide. We’ve already begun our journey with just such a system:

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Ellucian Banner Operational Data Store provides a consistent view of institutional data for everyone across campus. Data uses familiar business terms and definitions so departmental users can easily access the information they need to manage operational reporting, perform ad hoc queries, and make better decisions about their daily responsibilities.

Cognos Reports provides an enterprise level depth of features for reporting, metadata creation and data modelling. It features tools for self-serve ad-hoc, complex and dashboard reports with automated and event driven delivery.

The Importance of Business Intelligence in Modern Higher Education

2016 EDUCAUSE Top 10 IT Issue: BI and Analytics

Higher education institutions must become more data driven to capably respond to demands to become more effective and flexible and to meet both mission objectives and regulatory requirements. Business intelligence (BI) and analytics are the keys to unlocking insights that are contained in the numerous institutional data stores.

Gartner’s 2016 CIO Agenda Report

“Business Intelligence and Data Analytics are the top trending priority for global CIOs in 2016. This marks the fifth-consecutive year that BI and analytics has topped the list.

Business Intelligence and Data Analytics tools have certainly gone from being auxiliary parts of business to absolutely vital. It’s a near-certainty that BI and analytics will remain the top priority of global enterprise CIOs again in 2017, as the need to gain insights from data will continue to increase.”

Gartners 2016 CIO Agenda: A Higher Education Perspective

Business Intelligence and analytics are receiving the highest new funding of any technology in higher education:

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What the University of Lethbridge is Already Doing With Our Current Business Intelligence

“Cognos allowed us to automate 75% of the manual processes involved in generating our Fact Book publication which significantly reduced the time required to generate these institutional reports.”

“Enrolment management reports built in Cognos allow for weekly reports to be scheduled and run automatically from a reliable data source, saving time and reducing potential errors in the reporting process.  This type of reporting also enabled additional faculty and program specific reports to be developed and used to better inform institutional decision-making.”

James Croil, Acting Manager, Institutional Analysis

“It has given users within Financial Services more flexibility to run reports with a variety of parameters at any time rather than waiting for someone with expertise in MS Access to query finance tables and create the reports.”

Linda Anderson, Director, Finance System Support & Development, Financial Services

“With on-demand access to prospect reports, the ODS enables our fundraising managers to monitor development activity as often as they like, from their desk, on the road, or from home – at a time that is convenient for them.  This flexibility puts them in control while also freeing up the time of the report-writers for other tasks. We recognize that BI is important to help our institution better identify philanthropic prospects and compete for philanthropic contributions.”

Anna Linville, Manager, Advancement Services, University Advancement

 How We Compare to Other Higher Education Institutions With Business Intelligence

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Source: The Analytics Landscape in Higher Education, 2015 EDUCAUSE and Gartner

For any questions or further information, please contact Kevin Vadnais, 403-332-4056 or kevin.vadnais@uleth.ca.

Cybersecurity Awareness Month

Cybersecurity Awareness Month (the month of October) coincides with Electronic Records Day (October 10 – sponsored by the American Council of State Archivists). Now that the Records Management Program has been combined with the Information Security and Business Intelligence programs, the Information Management and Security Office wanted to celebrate these events collectively and raise awareness about everyone’s role in Information Management.

We would like to give a special thanks to the Faculty of Management who were kind enough to loan us their popcorn machine during many of our events. The aroma of fresh popcorn helped us begin the conversation with many different people.

Information Booths
On the week of October 3 – 7, the Information Security Office set up booths in the UHall Atrium, and attempted to steal the identities of people brave enough to offer up their names to us. On average, we were able to uncover unknown personal information for approximately 75% of the individuals who spoke with us. The volume and type of data varied, from limited information to a complete package that would facilitate identity theft. It was an excellent opportunity to discuss tips and tricks with everyone that stopped by.

We kicked off Electronic Records Week (Oct 10 – 14) by releasing a number of new guides and information sheets to help faculty and staff manage their records. The topics addressed by these guides include: distinguishing between transitory and university records; managing email; electronic file and folder naming conventions; and managing information overload.

To get the word out, Records Management staff spent much of the week out and about at information booths across campus. We connected with faculty, staff, and students and offered advice for better managing both personal and university records. We used the opportunity to soft launch our Designated Records Officer (DRO) program when chatting with managers and executive directors. We were also promoting A Nightmare on Shred Street, which was held on October 31.

Life Balance Fair
On October 26, 2016, our Wellness Committee hosted the 10th Annual Life Balance Fair. This event aims to increase employee’s and students’ awareness of the importance of workplace and school health in order to optimize personal and organizational performance. We think that effective records management and information security best practices contribute to workplace health and attended as exhibitors to share this message with University staff. We continued to try to steal identities, distribute our new guides, recruit DROs, and promote A Nightmare on Shred Street.

During the month of October, we signed up about 20 people for records management training, including 15 DROs. We distributed over 50 paper copies of each of our new guides, even though we were directing faculty and staff to the electronic versions posted on our website.

A Nightmare on Shred Street
On October 31, 2016, the entire Information Technology Services department teamed up with Lethbridge Mobile Shredding to host A Nightmare on Shred Street. This event offered free shredding of personal documents (paper and non-paper), hard-drive and other storage media degaussing and e-waste recycling. While the the cold (~2°C) and driving rain put quite a damper on the event (pun intended), we collected two cubic metres of e-waste, about two dozen hard drives for degaussing and almost 15 large (96 gallon) shredding bins of personal papers. In the process we raised $170 and about two 121L garbage cans full of food donations for the campus food bank!

Next Year
If anyone has ideas on how we can make this annual celebration of Information Management and Security better for next year’s event, please reach out to our offices; we would be happy to hear your ideas. Until next year…

Information Management and Security Office Staff:
Ashley Haughton – Records and Information Manager
Vicki Lund-Tulloch – Business Intelligence Administrator
Darin McGee – Information Security Analyst
Cheryl Read – Records Technician
Kevin Vadnais – Manager, Information Management and Security Office

IT Projects – how does the University decide?

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In order to determine which projects provide the best value to the University, an IT Projects Committee has been struck to tackle these large and critical decisions. “This is huge – it’s a very big step for IT,” says Chris Roberts, Manager for IT Services’ Project Management Office. “Prior to this, we had to use a ‘best effort’ approach to deciding which projects we had the capacity for, but this is obviously not ideal.”

Purchasing AtTask, a project portfolio management tool, provided a concrete solution to corralling and tracking all IT project requests into one central location. The next logical step was to form a committee to evaluate and prioritize all requests coming to ITS. “Leveraging this tool will help us report and sustain all projects by balancing resources with demand,” Roberts adds.

The IT Projects Committee, which will meet monthly, comprises representatives from across campus: Chris Horbachewski (VP Advancement), Chris Nicol (University Librarian), Charles Jorgenson (Acting Registrar), David Hinger (Director, Teaching Centre), Ken McInnes (Executive Director, HR), Carrie Takeyasu (Executive Director, Financial Services), TJ Hanson (Executive Director, Facilities), Jim Booth (Executive Director, Ancillary Services), along with IT Services reps: Mark Humphries (CIO), Darren Schell (Manager, Transformation), and Chris Roberts.

Roberts says the Committee is hoping to start its intake process later this spring, but further communication and details will follow.

 

 

Advizor implementation in Advancement

As part of the Ellucian Portal/BI project, a data visualization tool called Advizor was implemented in Advancement in December to query constituent data in ways not previously possible.  It has been extremely well received, and allows fundraising staff to answer a multitude of questions pertaining to their data visually and in real-time without assistance from technical experts.  A subsequent extension to this platform is now underway to leverage its predictive analytics capabilities, allowing the department to leverage its historical data to make predictions about future events.

Database Team

IT Services has created a Database team by moving three database administrators from its Systems team into a new unit. This creates two separate management roles and provides greater focus and back-up capabilities. Our database competency is becoming increasingly critical with our recent investments in database-backed systems, such as the Luminis and business intelligence tools.